Welcome to the Bioengineering Graduate Program

The Bioengineering Graduate Program was established by the Graduate School in January 2007, with the goal of providing an environment for students to receive training in a wide range of engineering and biological fields to prepare them for future careers in biomedical research.

Nine faculty from the University of Notre Dame have received awards for five projects from the Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics’ Discovery Fund. Each year, grants from the Discovery Fund are awarded to researchers who propose novel technologies and diagnostics that can improve human and environmental health.

Seminar title: "Nanomedicine and Genome Editing Approaches
for Disease Therapies"
Abstract excerpt: The integration of biomolecular engineering, nanotechnology and biology is expected to produce major breakthroughs in medical diagnostics and therapeutics. Due to the size-compatibility of nano-scale structures with proteins and nucleic acids, the design, synthesis and application of nanoprobes, nanocarriers and nanomachines provide unprecedented opportunities for achieving a better control of biological processes, and drastic improvements in disease detection, therapy, and prevention.

Seminar title: "Extreme Microfluidics" Label-Free Sorting of Extremely Rare Circulating Tumor Cells and Clusters
Abstract excerpt: Viable tumor-derived circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been identified in peripheral blood from cancer patients and are not only the origin of intractable metastatic disease but also marker for early cancer. However, the ability to isolate CTCs has proven to be difficult due to the exceedingly low frequency of CTCs in circulation. As a result, their clinical use until recently has been limited to prognosis with limited clinical utility.

Seminar title: "Visualizing Fast Ca2+ Dynamics around Microsurgical Wounds"
Abstract excerpt: For epithelial cells to heal a wound, those cells must first become aware of the presence, location, and size of the wound. This knowledge must be shared by cells in direct contact with the wound and those much further away, the latter of which must be recruited by some sort of mechanical or biochemical signal. We have investigated these signaling mechanisms using the exquisite spatial and temporal control afforded by laser-induced microsurgical wounds

Affiliations

Dr. Yoon’s lab utilizes ultrasonic transducers and microfluidic chips to develop integrated device to engineer cells for patient-specific therapy. One of the main thrust is the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with no mutagenesis. A new device for the intracellular delivery of ...